LESSON 8: Nakedness and Shame

28th General Audience, May 28, 1980
The shame found in humanity itself, both immanent and relative - manifests itself in human interiority and the other, respectively.

SEXUAL SHAME
Suggests that “man of concupiscence” in the act of the knowledge of good and evil experienced that he had simply ceased, also through his body and his sex, to remain above the world of living beings.

As if he had experienced a specific fracture of the personal integrity of his own body, particularly in that which determines its sexuality and which is directly linked with the call to that unity in which man and woman will be one flesh (Gn. 2:24).
Birth of human concupiscence.
Human heart possesses both desire and shame. The birth of shame, when man is closed to what comes from the Father, and opens himself to what comes from the world.

CORRUPTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS -- LOSS OF UNITIVE MEANING OF THE BODY.
29th General Audience, June 4, 1980
The original power of communicating themselves to each other had been shattered.
Radical change in the original meaning of nakedness, a negative change in the whole personal interpersonal relation between man and woman.

The purity and simplicity disappears from their original experience, which had helped to bring about a singular fullness of mutual self-communication
After original sin, man had lost the sense of the image of God in himself, a loss manifested by shame.

That shame, invading the man-woman relation as a whole, was manifested through the imbalance of the body as a specific “substratum of the communion of persons.

This communion was given up for the mere sensation of sexuality with regard to the other, as if sexuality became an obstacle in man’s personal relationship with woman.

DEEPER DIMENSION OF SHAME

​30th General Audience, June 18, 1980
Your desire shall be fore your husband, but he will dominate you (Gen. 3:16)
Original conjugal union of persons was to be deformed in man’s heart by concupiscence.

MEANING OF “INSATIABILITY OF UNION”
The woman whose desire shall be for her husband and the man, whose response to this desire, as we read, is to “dominate her.”
They are now a different couple; they are no longer only called to union and unity, but are also threatened by the insatiability of that union and unity.
Does not the domination of man over woman change the structure of interpersonal relations? An object for concupiscible eyes?

WHERE DOES THE INSATIABILITY OF THE UNION COME FROM?
31st General Audience, June 25, 1980
The relationship of communion is replaced with a relationship of possession, as an object of one’s own desire.

32nd General Audience, July 23, 1980
LOSS OF THE FREEDOM OF THE GIFT
Man is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, and at the same time, the one who cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of self.
Concupiscence attacks the sincere gift. It deprives man of the dignity of the gift which is expressed by his body through femininity and masculinity, depersonalising man, making him an object for the other.

33rd General Audience, July 30, 1980
THE INNER MEASURE OF BELONGING
Concupiscence has the effect that the body becomes a terrain of appropriation of the other person.

Loss of spousal meaning of the body.
 
The particular dimension of the personal union of man and woman is expressed through the word “my”
In the eternal language of human love, the term my indicates reciprocity of giving, it expresses the equilibrium of the gift.

Essential meaning of “my” lies outside the law of property outside the meaning of object of possession. Concupiscence instead is oriented toward the latter meaning.
From possessing to enjoyment -- the object I possess gains a certain significance for me in as much as it is at my disposal and I put it to my service, I use it.

The disinterested gift is excluded by egotistical enjoyment. 
In Gen. 3 and Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, there is a concrete dimension, of the opposition between spirit and the body, that was born together with sin, in the human heart.

​The desire of the body shows itself stronger than the desire of the mind.